There are many XML standards for expressing finance data as XML. Below is a list of spec'swhich are being promoted by various bodies. In time I expect some of these standards torise to prominance and some to diappear. The questions is which ones and why?ebXML - http://www.ebxml.org/ FpML - Financial Products Markup Language, http://www.fpml.org/ FIXML - http://www.FIXprotocol.org/ IFX - Interactive Financial eXchange, http://www.ifxforum.org/ ISO 15022 - http://www.iso15022.org/, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/XML_Init_Main MDDL - Market Data Definition Language, http://www.mddl.org/ NewsML - http://www.newsml.org/, http://newsshowcase.reuters.com/ NITF - News Industry Text Format, http://www.nitf.org/ OFX - Open Financial Exchange, http://www.ofx.net/ RELAX NG, http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/relax-ng/ RIXML - Research Information eXchange Markup Language, http://www.rixml.org/ Schematron - http://www.ascc.net/xml/resource/schema ... atron.html swiftML - http://www.swift.com/index.cfm?item_id=6609 XBRL - eXtensible Business Reporting Language, http://www.xbrl.org/ Further, what (if any) data providers will support these standards?Since XML is not a very compact way to express data these standards shouldhave associated data compression tools/algorithms.In principle XML is a good thing but that does not always translate into a good developer/end-userexperience. What is your experience with using XML in your financial Apps? Ben

At least for FpML, I think the problem is not one of technology, but instead, of the huge reluctance of financial institutions to change.An article on this topic (attributed to the wrong author) appeared in the Jan edition of Wilmott.Unfortunately, in the boom-bust cycle that IS investment banking technology, institutions would rather continue to spend $1 billion a year to manually process their derivative transactions.What you say is correct, XML is not compact. But I don't think this is a problem. It's quite simpleto achieve excellent compression using the ZLIB library, which is available as Open Source in just aboutevery language. When used in the -intended way-, I don't think the compression is even necessary.

Doesn't TIBCO use XML?

XML is an inherent part of .NET, which is probably going to do very, very well in the future. Keep in mind that XML is used for different purposes within/between applications. I'm not sure about the adoption of any particular flavor of financial XML standard by many vendors, but I think many in-house development groups will/do develop their own internal XML standards, for their own needs.PW

Well, every place I know is pushing to do STP, which would be havily XML based. I found that XML is great especially since the data is human parsable: - easier to debug my apps on component level - no bit-rot, if some file sticks around but the app to read it is long gone/broken, simple perl script can read and transform the datanevertheless, there is nothing magic about XML it is just a tool.

there is this group here ..which focuses on this specific question you have posed..

Thanks everyone,There is so much value to be created through STP, and as I said before with the .NET and J2EE platform it is now a feasible aim. Thats exactly it, $1 billion a year to get people to shuffle paper. I am interested to know who is pushing for STP since the saves our clearly there but also people are into cost cutting mode, in the boom0buct cycle. People want ROI in 6mths.I will check out the ZLIB library, but eventually a optimized parser and compressor should exist for each of the major financial XML sets of mark up tags. Pinball, XML is implied in J2EE and .NET but I did not want to mention this because I thought we may end up going down to "I love C++, C#/Java sucks path" in this discussion. Also yesterday I found that OfficeXP, Office 2000 support Web services since they have Microsoft XML Core Services (i.e. XML parser) 3.0 or higher combined. This already means using Excel as a WS fat client wudely is possible today. I cannot imagine most institutions constructing there own finance ML (XML or otherwise), one is takes alot of work and secondly the value of a ML of that it is widely used.Do people feel that the finance XML standards are mature enough to use it banking middleware? What version?Ben

>Do people feel that the finance XML standards are mature enough to use it banking middleware? What version?in equities and xchange traded equity derivs the following are actively used:fixml for front office stuffswitml for back officetheir superset (something like ISO 15022) for STP

I find the problem so far with xml standards are not the standards (the idea is great!) but with the slow pace with which the standard evolves.By the time a xml standard has been developed, 2 or more software product cycles by middleware companies has been completed and the standard is obsolete and a marginal player. So there's the unfortunate risk of betting on the wrong horse ;-/I think the xml syntax used by the leading market vendors in their products will make it. Others won't.The good part is of course that if well made, the xml should be easy to transform..For my part, I'm looking for a price feed and instrument definition XML standard but have still turned up empty handed besides vendor specific implementations.

Have you looked at:http://data.island.comThey have a (beta) Web service data feed at:http://data.island.com/ds/dev/ws/beta/

QuoteOriginally posted by: DrBenHave you looked at:http://data.island.comThey have a (beta) Web service data feed at:http://data.island.com/ds/dev/ws/beta/Interesting, will immidiately have a look. Thanks.

Let me know what you think?Not sure what tools they offer but they should offer some XMLT (or similar)to transform there markup into other standard XML dictionaries (i.e. FinML and similar).